Language Log

Today's the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, and I've commemorated the event in a Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus by considering lyrics from four of his most famous songs. As you might have guessed, the four songs are "Oh Boy," "That'll Be the Day," "Rave On," and "Not Fade Away." You can check out the column here. As a postscript, one of those four song titles has an extra syntactic wrinkle that's worth mulling over.

Last Sunday's Get Fuzzy:

As we've often observed, the semantic relationship between the elements of English complex nominals is very variable — consider for example olive oil, hair oil, and midnight oil. But my intuition, FWIW, says that "anger management" can't mean "management of angry people" — and not just because the phrase is already taken for another meaning. (Of course Satchel, who thinks that "jerk chicken" is a job description, is an amusingly unreliable lexicographer.)

Meanwhile, in other nominal news from unreliable sources, Daniel Schaefer in the Financial Times recently warned us about a German compound noun bubble ("The German language goes long"):

At first glance, Germany has avoided the sort of bubbles that have burst elsewhere. There was no house price inflation in a country lacking homeowners. Neither did the nation of savers have a decent credit bubble.

But beware. A dangerous bubble is taking over a country famed for its steadiness. The financial crisis and the notorious German Angst have combined to form an explosive boom: in compound nouns.

This verbal euphoria appears innocent when it comes to words such as Rettungsschirm (“rescue umbrella”), Rettungspaket (“rescue package”) or Kapitalspritze (“capital injection”). But it takes on ear-bursting brutality with words such as Abwrackprämie (“scrap premium”) – recently offered for trading in old cars to stimulate the automobile industry.

More worryingly, this passion for joining up nouns, albeit unlikely to spread around the world as fast as a subprime mortgage bond, is growing quickly in Germany.

As I got out of my taxi at the Helsinki Vantaa airport on my way home, in bright sunshine, I noticed something strange. There were sparkles in the air. Tiny flickering rainbow-sparkling air sequins were all around my head. At first I blinked, thinking my eyes were playing tricks. But it was real. Every cubic inch of the cold air around me had tiny floating ice crystals in it. Gently drifting almost-invisible nano-snowflakes, falling from a clear blue sky, sparkling like tiny prisms — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — in the bright winter sun. Finland didn't want me to leave, and was showing off new forms of beauty. I had never seen precipitation of this kind before. I hate to admit it, since it can only encourage the millions of people who will insist this is connected to some sort of profound insight about language and thought, but… it was a kind of snow I didn't have a word for.

I think we can agree that Ben Roethlisberger, who won the Super Bowl for the second time last night, has finished hitting the iceberg. Unfortunately, "starting to hit the iceberg" remains a rarely-used cliché.

Transcription practices are in the news (Patricia Cohen, "John Dean's Role at Issue in Nixon Tapes Feud". NYT 1/31/2009):

Scholarly feuds seldom end amicably, and nearly 35 years after President Richard M. Nixon resigned, a dispute involving his Watergate tapes would seem to be no exception.

A handful of historians and authors maintain that the most authoritative transcripts of those recordings include significant omissions and misrepresentations that could influence interpretations of the cover-up.

At the center of the quarrel is “Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes,” a 1997 collection of transcripts edited by Stanley I. Kutler, a pre-eminent historian of the Watergate era, that has become the standard reference. Mr. Kutler has been a hero to many people because of a lawsuit he brought with the nonprofit group Public Citizen that led to the release of 201 hours of recordings related to unethical or illegal activity in the Nixon White House.

But longtime critics of his transcripts say Mr. Kutler deliberately edited the tapes in ways that painted a more benign portrait of a central figure in the drama, the conspirator-turned-star-witness, John W. Dean III, the White House counsel who told Nixon that Watergate had become a “cancer” on his presidency.

To Mr. Kutler’s scholarly critics, though, the most serious failing is that excerpts from two separate conversations that took place on March 16 — one made during a face-to-face meeting in the morning, and a second over the telephone in the evening — were reversed in order and presented as part of one continuous meeting. Most of the evening conversation between Mr. Dean and Nixon was eliminated, as were any references to it.

The most famous of all Finnish composers is surely Sibelius. His Latin name is that of his originally Swedish-speaking family, though he was born in Finland when it was a Grand Duchy within Russia, and his parents educated him in a Finnish-language school. In Latin (and in Swedish) the name Sibelius would have stress on the second syllable: Si.bé.li.us. But in Finnish there is an invariant rule that all words are stressed on the first syllable. So how on earth do the Finns say the name of this celebrated composer and Finnish nationalist?

In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston's schoolkids. Baker explains:

Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight — person one insults person two, and person three informs person one that he or she has just been salted. It's an exclamation point on someone else's insult….

Salted, in this usage, appears to be exclusive to the region, and its demographic reaches from late grammar school into high school. The etymology of salted, however, is the subject of much debate. One camp says it's an abbreviation of insulted, and the word is actually "sulted." Others say it's short for assaulted. The third school, and the one that is most convinced that it's right, says it simply comes from the idea of throwing salt into a wound. But when it is used, and how, is not up for debate; and in this case, the particular word may be new but the role it plays is not. Depending on where you grew up and when, you may have heard other terms perform similar duty: "Burned." "Busted." "Faced." "Dissed." "Sauced."

What comes next should be utterly predictable to Language Log readers.

Paul Armstrong has reminded me of the Authors@Google videos (available on YouTube) — videos of authors talking at Google on their recent books. At least five are of interest to linguists:

Noam Chomsky (4/25/08)

Erin McKean (3/29/06)

Geoffrey Nunberg (10/12/06)

Steven Pinker (9/24/07)

John Searle (10/30/07)

[Added 2/2:

Ray Jackendoff (8/30/07)

George Lakoff (7/12/07)

George Lakoff (6/4/08)

(Of the eight videos listed here, some are more directly related to linguistics than others.)]

[Added 2/7: from Ben Zimmer, three more talks at Google:

Tom Dalzell
Christine Kenneally
David Harrison and Gregory Anderson ]

I'm a fan of Ian M. Banks' Culture novels, but I'd like to suggest, respectfully, that they might be improved in their approach to matters linguistic. As an example, on p. 470 of his recently-released novel Matter, we learn that "Marain, the Culture's language, had a phoneme to denote upper case".

Linguists would usually call a unit that denotes something a morpheme (or perhaps a word), not a phoneme, even if it was only one phoneme long. (In fact, we sometimes find meaningful units whose effect on pronunciation is just a single feature.)

In addition, it's odd to find a morpheme that signals something essentially in the realm of writing, like alphabetic case; and also to find that Marain still uses upper case in (some of) the same ways that English does.

Outrage reigns in Britain over the decision by the Birmingham city council to stop using apostrophes on its street signs; the AP story, by Meera Selva, is here.

I don't know about the languages that Montaigne was thinking of, but the claim that some languages lack a word for lying is one that has continued to crop up. A few months ago Steven Point, who is currently the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, asserted that there is no word for "lying" in his language, Halkomelem. It appears, however, that he is mistaken: my sources say that in his language smétnqən means "to lie, speak falsely" and that q̓íq̓əl̓stéxʷ means "to lie, deceive".

An earlier example of the same theme is due to no other than John Wayne, who in the classic western Hondo asserts that "The Apaches have no word for 'lie'." That is sort of true: the Western Apache dictionary that I own lists not one but two different expressions for lying. There is a verb meaning specifically "to lie", e.g. ɬeíɬchoo "he lies", as well as an expression meaning "to lie, deceive", e.g. bich'ii' nashch'aa "I lie to him".

It may well be true that these cultures have a particularly negative view of lying, but tall tales about the lack of a word for it aren't a good way of making this point.

As we've recently seen, people love the idea that a culture is revealed by its lexicon. The earliest example of this trope that I can think of is in Michel de Montaigne's 1580 essay "Of Cannibals". This is one of the founding documents of the "noble savage" tradition, and presents the alleged lack of certain words for certain bad things as evidence of the essential goodness of humanity in the state of nature:

These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours: but 'tis in such purity, that I am sometimes troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them: for to my apprehension, what we now see in those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of. How much would he find his imaginary republic short of his perfection? [emphasis added]

I'd be curious to know whether it's now possible to determine which New World language (or language-family) the "cannibal" that Montaigne interviewed in Rouen in 1562 spoke, so that the truth of his assertions about the lack (for example) of a word for lying could be checked. [Update: it was Tupinambá.] I'd lay my money against him, if there were any chance to settle the bet one way or the other.

Mark has just supplied new Language Log readers with a reference archive of Language Log posts about languages with lots of words for certain things, and languages with no words for certain things. It is a theme that intrigues ordinary folk; it almost mesmerises them. It is clear that nothing Language Log can do will ever discredit the twin notions that (1) lexical abundance correlates with conceptual or environmental or perceptual richness, and (2) that lexical thrift betokens a poorer and meaner experiential world.